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A Social Media Strategy Engagement Primer

[This post continues aimClear’s ongoing coverage of Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009.] Your company’s Facebook account is an entirely different animal than your mom’s. Companies have a lot more at stake when it comes to social media. Research, strategy development and a clear plan for measurement are a crucial prerequisites to engaging customers in online social space.

Nan Dawkins, Founder and CEO of Serengeti Communication, started the Serengeti sponsored segment by introducing a few statistics:

40% of searches are for what’s going on right now. By the end of 2009 31% of SERPs will be blended.

3 out of 4 Americans use social media, but where should companies start?

Stop thinking about “Social Media.” We tend to think about destination when we should be thinking about people. We are creating the web 2.0 world in which we live. Take a step back. Don’t think about the places people are, think about how to make friends and serve the users and customers.

You’re not going to manipulate people into doing something they don’t want to do.

Reality check. You have to be measurable. But when it comes to measurement it’s not even close to perfection. Not PR, not TV/Radio, not even search.

Do you want to sell your product, use as customer service or lift the buzz? If you go out on twitter and you don’t know what your goal is, how do you know if you’re successful?

Go where your audience is. What you do is just as important as where you go. Look at the communities and discover the nuances. In some communities you have to soft-sell or they’ll kick you out some communies you can be a bit more brash and hard-sell.

Understand conversations.

Where do you fit into THEIR world? And how can you add value? If you can’t give them value they will reject you as spam.

Applying marketing tactics in absence of strategy is no better than doing nothing at all.

Nathan Linnell, Director of analytics next presented ways to measure social media ROI.

Yes, Virginia, it is possible!

But, there are no plug-and-play solutions. It requires some elbow grease and data aggregation.

Where can impact be observed?

Internally:

Corporate websites

Company blogs

Sponsored communities

External Online From:

Facebook

YouTube

Yelp

External Offline: focus groups and surveys to conduct before and after.

Internal web analytics:

Corporate website

Enterprise generated media (EGM)

Company blogs

Company forums

Website’s analytics package

External sites.

What to measure:

Direct traffic brand searches (Look at the correlations between the two. It’s not an exact science, but a good indicator.)

Visits referred by key social media sites

Social media referred visits attributed to company’s social media efforts

Conversions generated from social media

Other site behavior of social media referred traffic compared to other channels (engagement metrics)

Blogs and Communities:

Subscribers (views and clicks)

Comments/posts

Incoming links

Retweets of posts

Unique visitors

Members

Social sites such as:

Facebook:

Fan page / active fans

Media consumption

Total interactions (Likes, comments, wall posts)

Twitter:

Followers (unique/quality)

Retweets

Mentions (not just from your followers) compare this to your competitors!

Brand mentions

YouTube:

Channel

Page views

Subscribers

Friends

Comments

Videos

Views

Ratings

Comments

Favorite

Sources of Data

Monitoring Tools:

Aggregated view of buzz across web:

Volume of mentions

Brand, competitors and topic

Share voice(don’t just jump in when someone talks about you)

Share by social media type

Top sources/locations (what are top sources that have to most mention of my brand & how big are those communities. Look at alexa data)

Sentiment

Influencers

Not a single source solution:

– “total volume” of buzz not true measure. Many need passwords

– Still need specific metrics from ind

Research:

– Offline focus groups etc.

Build Measurement Framework

Financial impact:

Revenue generated

Cost savings

Cost avoidance (call center customer service)

Non-Financial Impact:

Brand awareness

Purchase intent

Willingness to recommend product

Define what constitutes success:

Branding goals

Direct sales or lead gen?

Both

Think about the buying process, it will keep you focused on most important metrics.

Map metrics to goals:

Quality, not quantity

It’s all in the combination

What suggests action?

Figure out:

Do I have the right tools?

Who? (Stakeholders & data gatekeepers)

How? (Integration & aggregation)

Never implement what you can’t measure because you’ll never know if you were successful. ROI measures are what management wants to see, and they write your checks.

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After receiving a full-contact, crash-course in nearly everything online marketing she found her sweet-spot in Facebook marketing and deep, dense psychographic targeting. Merry describes her enthusiasm for online marketing as a love of the innovation, pace, and creativity potential. “The industry moves so fast, it’s impossible to get bored.”